A ‘Recipe for Depopulation’? School Closures and Local Population Decline in Saxony

Bilal Barakat

    Publikation: Wissenschaftliche FachzeitschriftOriginalbeitrag in FachzeitschriftBegutachtung

    Abstract

    A popular notion asserts that closing the last
    primary school marks a community’ s
    demographic death. No young parents will
    remain, much less new ones move in. This
    notion is frequently voiced but rarely verified.
    Are school closures a cause or consequence of
    local decline? This study reviews existing
    research on school locations and peripheral
    population decline to show that expectations of
    a dramatic impact of school closures on
    out-migration are theoretically ill-founded. I
    proceed to discuss specific methodological
    challenges in the empirical analysis of this re-
    lationship, and conduct a statistical analysis for
    the province of Saxony in East Germany for the
    period 1994–2007. In contrast to the prevailing
    discourse, there is little evidence of an appre-
    ciable effect of primary school closures on local
    population decline. This negative finding is
    discussed in light of local contextual factors and
    general insights from population geography.
    OriginalspracheEnglisch
    Seiten (von - bis)735 - 753
    FachzeitschriftPopulation, Space and Place
    Jahrgang21
    DOIs
    PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 2014

    Österreichische Systematik der Wissenschaftszweige (ÖFOS)

    • 502005 Bildungsökonomie
    • 504007 Empirische Sozialforschung
    • 504006 Demographie
    • 504005 Bildungssoziologie
    • 504004 Bevölkerungsstatistik
    • 503006 Bildungsforschung
    • 509013 Sozialstatistik
    • 507017 Sozialgeographie
    • 507002 Bevölkerungsgeographie

    Zitat